Those poor, poor boys. The scale of the horror is incomprehensible. And for what?

Eugene V. Debs, socialist candidate for president, went to federal prison for asking that very question, in the words used by the President of the United States when running for re-election on the slogan “He kept us out of war.”

I’ve always thought the best guess is that J.P. Morgan explained to President Wilson that if Britain and France couldn’t pay back loans to his financial firm, then the House of Morgan would go bankrupt, and it was too big to fail.

The Civil War — for what? For the vanity of greedy cheap labor plantation aristocrats on one hand and moralistic abolitionist zealots on the other. For the incalcuable vexation, right up to the present day, of integrating the emancipated and their descendants (who by 1865 had become much too numerous to repatriate).

The Spanish-American War — for what? For messianic delusions of “civilizing” and Christianizing the (already mostly Catholic) Filipinos. For the joy of incorporating Puerto Rico into our polity (because who needs the South Bronx anyway, amirite?).

World War I — for what? For “democracy”. For “self-determination”. For more messianic, pseudo-Christian delusion and heresy. Oh, and for giving birth to Bolshevism.

World War II — for what? For making Europe safe for Stalin. For crushing the world’s second-worst despotism in order to entrench the very worst. For justifying more power for Franklin Roosevelt. For “curing” “racist,” “anti-Semitic” WASP America of its “isolationism”. For providing fodder for endless guilt trips and moralistic harangues until the Eschaton. For ruining our ability to have rational discussions about immigration, assimilation of minorities, international trade, military intervention, international bodies, and evolutionary science.

Korea — for what? For having half the little Korean peninsula as friendly turf. Hooray.

Vietnam — for what? For stopping the domino effect. For preserving the honest, competent, and popular rule of those nice men in Saigon. Ensuring that America would never again be threatened by some backward, stinky stretch of jungle.

Lebanon — for what? For the safety of Israel’s northern border.

The Persian Gulf War — for what? For oil. For Israel. For the House of Saud.

Somalia — for what? For our moral vanity.

Kosovo — for what? For getting the world’s Muslims to love us. For humiliating those Nazi Serbs, or something. For assuaging our guilt over the Holocaust. For sticking our thumbs in the eyes of those damn Russkies. For inspiring Putin to take Crimea.

Iraq — for what? For yet more messianic delusion masquerading as Christianity. For Israel and its puppeteers in our politics. For Bush’s reelection and future glorification by “history”. For our irrational urge to Do Something after September 11th.

Afghanistan — for what? For sending little Afghan girls to school. For imposing Western values, gay marriage, and liberty and justice for all on the Pashtuns and other central Asian retrogrades. For reviving the opium trade in Afghanistan. For giving Pakistan, specifically the ISI, the opportunity to play us for fools for a decade and more.

My family made it through WWI, though my great-grandfather was gassed and had lifelong health problems from it. We lost two in Normandy and the Bulge in WWII.

I agree with the commenter about the wars permanently disfiguring Europe, and I would say that they later wrecked America (through the Cold War and its aftermath) and the Catholic Church too.

There are going to be many, many, many commemorations and memorials and other events to mark the centenary in Europe over the next four years. Those thinking about a trip to Europe should see what’s on.

On Saturday I’m going to one myself, a lecture at the Orchard Tea Gardens in Grantchester, appropriately (given the Orchard’s connections to famous writers of that generation) about some of the great literature produced in the midst of the cataclysm.

The wars had two devastating effects on the Western psyche: First it democratised a strain of nihilism that had existed among only a small group of antebellum intellectuals. This mass nihilism was expressed in mass consumerism and its reactions, the Sexual Revolution (consumerism of the body), decadent popular culture (not just sex but violence), multiplication of sub- and countercultures unconscious existentialism, postmodernism, irreligion and anti-religion, etc.

Counterintuitively the wars at the same time let to a destructive new cult of Progress that, instead of looking to build on the past’s achievements, denigrated and sought to obliterate everything about the discredited past and build a grand new future ex nihilo. Once again, this existed in a small group of intellectuals before getting democratised by the effect of the wars.

Not just the opening paragraphs of that rubbish Times article. Did you see this?

For leading European Jews, though, the far-right surge stirred deep alarm, coming a day after a deadly attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

“These two events are connected, and connected very closely,” said Moshe Kantor, the president of the European Jewish Congress. “The European Union is supposed to be the bulwark against the rise of racism and intolerance, but it has become the catalyst for the justification of its citizens to vote for extremists and racists.”

What a sick irony this will be if the culprits in Brussels (as is likely, considering recent history) turn out to be Islamists. Jews are emigrating from Europe—it must be because of all those nasty right-wing racists, right, NYT?

“We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.

14% of the Canadians that served in Europe died there. Add in the wounded and it was over half.

McCrae is good but I recommend another Canadian poet on the subject.

“The songs of the wars are as old as the hills
They cling like the rust on the cold steel that kills
They tell of the boys who went down to the tracks
In a patriotic manner with the cold steel on their backs”

Millions of young men slaughtered due to the arrogance and stupidity of their political leaders. It happens again and again. Today we have the neocon chickenhawks, who seem intent on getting us into one war after another. For what?

I tell my students that the impact of the war touched millions of lives in a variety of ways. I remember that one of my fellow graduate students forty years ago told me that his grandfather (lived his whole life in New Hampshire) had only voted for one Democrat in his life. He voted for Wilson in 1916 because “he kept us out of war.” It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I don’t remember the exact source, but somewhere Bertrand Russell said that no one who hadn’t grown up before World War I could ever completely, truly know what it was to be happy. I’ve always found that to be a haunting statement.

And that senseless struggle contributed directly to the fall of those hoary empires – the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, even the Ottomans. And what replaced them was almost everywhere much worse.

“For what” is a complex question and the answer is not self-evident. Many contemporary Britons and Frenchmen would have said “to preserve Europe’s freedom from German hegemony.” That is not a frivolous answer, especially ex ante, even if one disagees. See Max Hastings’ new book on the topic, Catastrophe 1914.

Damn, that boy could write. His death so young is only an infinitesimal fraction of what Europe and the world lost during those years, and yet his death alone would be enough to make the war a tragedy.

What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Of course I agree entirely. I hate to have to put such a fine point on it Rod, but WWI and all the war and totalitarianism of the 20th century it spawned was Orthodoxy’s gift to the modern world – that is, all set in motion by the Russian desire to conquer the straits and restore Constantinople or “Tsargrad”. (See Sean McMeekin – “The Russian Origins of the First World War” and “July 1914″)

That said, it is equally true that once the war started, all that followed was only enabled by the U.S. entry allowing the Allies a decisive victory. In the words of the American Socialist writer Oscar Ameringer:

‘”The leader in that national self-deception was Woodrow Wilson. His cocksureness, and magnificent talent for phrasemaking – “neutral even in spirit,” “too proud to fight,” “benevolent neutrality,” “peace without victory,” and finally, “war to make the world safe for democracy” – made him the mouthpiece of the very forces which in the beginning of his career he had denounced as the “invisible government” and threatened to “hang higher than Haman.” In the end the man hanged himself and his country, the peace of the world, and became the godfather of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin.”‘

Tumarion: I think that was actually Talleyrand on life before the French Revolution (from his own oversexed-aristocrat perspective). Not that both events weren’t legitimately awful, but it shows that there’s always thought to be a Golden Age just a bit further back.

And of course we must never forget the image of the British soldiers at Ypres in their gas masks, as one of them said, “I don’t care how cool we look. The place stinks.”

And of course the flight crews lined up to go on a mission over the front and the wing commander says, “Now, flight sergeant Smythe-Roberts, we all know mistakes happen but do try not to shoot your tail off again.”

I forget where, either in Doris Lessing or Paul Fussel, there is a description of a WWI movie playing in a theatre in the 1950s. As the crowd leaves, an older woman stands at the entrance and forces every departing theatre-goer to see her. The writer noted, she was forcing the audience, glorying in war, to recognize her as one of a generation of British women who never had a chance at a husband and a family because of the slaughter of millions of British men.

In every village–every little crossing in the road–in England there is a cenotaph, a monument listing the fallen of the Great War. Read the names, and you realize that many of these villages lost more than half of their young men of a certain generation. Families lost every male in them.

But as for that woman, I have little sympathy for her. Study the role women have in whipping up men to go to war, as Fussel did in The Great War and Modern Memory, and it becomes quite ugly. Think of the white feather, the act of publicly shaming men who knew better than to volunteer for the slaughter.

I used to be able to find the full scene, but now it has disappeared. The entire movie, The Americanization of Emily, thoroughly skewers all the moral high and mightiness women get out of men dying in war.

Worth remembering every time someone passes gas about letting women decide matters such as going to war.